A customer wants to refactor a mainframe application purely to reduce the number of source files. What should a consultant advise?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Fewer files isn’t the goal. You should isolate what actually belongs together, because file count alone doesn’t prove good structure.
Full Explanation
The correct advice is to refactor to isolate cohesive business capabilities instead, since file count alone is not a meaningful measure of good structure. Reducing file count says nothing about whether the resulting structure reflects genuine business capabilities, and it can even hide poor cohesion behind fewer, larger files. The choice to proceed because fewer files always means a simpler, more maintainable system is incorrect because file count is a poor proxy for maintainability; a small number of tangled files can be worse than many cohesive ones. The choice to proceed only after doubling the size of the development team is incorrect because staffing size does not address what the refactor should actually target. The choice to refuse to refactor until the application is rewritten from scratch is incorrect because a full rewrite is not required to achieve capability-based structure. For the exam, redirect a file-count goal towards a cohesion goal.